Their embroidered vests, their costly silks and satins, their emerald and diamond buckles, their point-lace ruffles, their rare furs, their jewelled rapiers, and their perfumed handkerchiefs were peculiar to themselves,—­for in those days wealthy shopkeepers, and even the daughters of prosperous notaries, could ill afford such luxuries, and were scarcely allowed to shine in them if they would.  A velvet coat then cost more than one thousand francs; while the ruffs and frills, and diamond studs and knee-buckles, and other appendages to the dress of a gentleman, swelled the amount to scarcely less than forty thousand francs, or sixteen hundred louis-d’or.  If a distinguished advocate was admitted to the presence of royalty, he must appear in simple black.  Gorgeous dresses were reserved only for the noblesse, some one hundred and fifty thousand privileged persons; all the rest were roturiers, marked by some emblem of meanness or inferiority, whatever might be their intellectual and moral worth.  Never were the noblesse more enervated; and yet they always appeared in a mock-heroic costume, with swords dangling at their sides, or hats cocked after a military fashion on their heads.  As the strength of Samson of old was in his locks, so the degenerate nobles of this period guarded with especial care these masculine ornaments of the person; and so great was the contagion for wigs and hair-powder, that twelve hundred shops existed in Paris to furnish this aristocratic luxury.  The muses of Rome in the days of her decline condescended to sing on the arts of cookery and the sublime occupations of hunting and fishing; so in the heroic times of Louis XV. the genius of France soared to comprehend the mysteries of the toilet.  One eminent savant, in this department of philosophical wisdom, absolutely published a bulky volume on the principles of hair-dressing, and followed it—­so highly was it prized—­by a no less ponderous supplement.  This was the time when the cuisine of nobles was as famous as their toilets, and when recipes for different dishes were only equalled in variety by the epigrams of ribald poets.  It was a period not merely of degrading follies, but of shameless exposure of them,—­when men boasted of their gallantries, and women joked at their own infirmities; and when hypocrisy, if it was ever added to their other vices, only served to make them more ridiculous and unnatural.  The rouge with which they painted their faces, and the powder which they sprinkled upon their hair were not used to give them the semblance of youthful beauty, but rather to impart the purple hues of perpetual drunkenness, such as Rubens gave to his Bacchanalian deities, united with the blanched whiteness of premature old age.  Licentiousness without shame, drunkenness without rebuke, gambling without honor, and frivolity without wit characterized, alas, a great proportion of that “upper class” who disdained the occupations and sneered at the virtues of industrial life.